A song about a communications satellite? In the latter half of 1962, British pop-music producer Joe Meek had no problem with that idea. Inspired by a celebrated space gadget, Meek devised an instrumental composition and turned it over to the Tornados, a band that had started out as his session musicians. The resulting tune Telstar, became the top hit in both the U.K. and the United States. Thus did the Space Age enter a new phase, with the world cheering a revolution in broadcasting enabled by a satellite launched on July 10, 1962, 50 years ago.

The path to Joe Meek’s paean began with a fateful article in the October 1945, issue of a British journal called Wireless World. Its writer proposed that a manned station be placed in orbit around the Earth at over 22,000 miles (35,542 kilometres) above the ground. At that distance, said station would circle the Earth in unison with the Earth’s own rotation on its axis. Since the orbital vehicle would always be above a precise spot on the Earth, it would be ideal for relaying telecommunications. The writer of this article? Arthur C. Clarke, later to be famous for such novels as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Clarke’s article was not completely prophetic: He later admitted that he had not anticipated advancements in unmanned space vehicles. Still, he was seven years ahead of his time, because the notion of communications satellites took that long to heat up — and science fiction continued to play a role. A 1952 issue of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction featured an article on the challenge of communicating in space. Its writer went under the named of “J.J. Coupling” (an esoteric in-joke referring to a form of quantum-mechanical analysis). Coupling was never a top science fiction figure, but he was significant. His first story appeared in 1930, and he also began writing science articles for Astounding in 1944. However, many people would have been shocked to learn his true identity: John R. Pierce, a senior official at the legendary Bell Telephone Laboratories (or Bell Labs), a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T).

Born in Iowa in 1910, Pierce grew up in California, where, in 1929, he befriended none other than Hugo Gernsback, regarded by many as the father of U.S. science fiction. Pierce soon began writing science fiction himself, and the sale of his stories reportedly helped pay his way through the California Institute of Technology, which awarded him a PhD in electrical engineering in 1936. Bell Labs recruited him the same year. Pierce would be present in 1947-1948, when Bell Labs researchers invented that key component of modern electronics, the transistor — and Pierce was the one who coined its name. He then became director of electronics research for the labs in 1952 and director of communications research in 1955.

Ironically, when Pierce wrote his 1952 piece for Astounding, he was not even aware of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1945 article. (Space flight historian T.A. Heppenheimer says he even missed a 1951 book by Clarke that elaborated on the 1945 article.) By the mid-1950s, however, Pierce learned of Clarke’s ideas and was incorporating them into his growing obsession with space communications.

Calvin Tomkins, who profiled Pierce for the New Yorker magazine in 1963, found that Pierce’s breakthrough occurred in a scientific paper issued under his true name in 1955. In it, Pierce mapped out the dilemma of 1950s microwave-transmission technology, which was hampered by the need for relay stations at intervals between the origin of a signal and its destination. On land, that was not a problem; in the empty expanse of the oceans, it was. (Undersea communications cables were an alternative but were costly and limited in capacity.)

The answer, Pierce argued, was to use satellites to leapfrog over the oceans. Such satellites could be “passive” (inert shiny objects that reflected signals) or “active” (actual machines that received, amplified and re-transmitted signals). Also, they could be positioned at Arthur C. Clarke’s optimal orbit (which was so efficient that only three devices there would service the whole Earth) or at lower levels (where many more would be needed).

Knowing the precise options did not guarantee their implementation, but Pierce was lucky, because the Cold War provided incentive. In October, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik. Sputnik was not a communications satellite — basically, it did nothing more than beep via radio — but it still launched a space race.

Almost exactly a year after Sputnik, the U.S. civilian space agency NASA became operational. The Pentagon also reacted quickly. Although Pierce regarded military space programs as hasty and spendthrift, the U.S. Army Signal Corps literally scored in December, 1958, with the launch of SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), which was capable of receiving and sending messages, making it the first communications satellite of any kind.

Finally, after years of frustration, doors began to open to Pierce. In early 1959, Bell Labs and NASA reached a deal to try out a passive communications system, which led to Echo 1. Amazingly simple, Echo 1 was just a huge balloon with an aluminum coating. (As such, it was begging for a UFO flap, and a trial run of the system, at very low altitude in late 1959, did indeed cause concern across the U.S. Atlantic seaboard.) Launched in August 1960, Echo 1 efficiently reflected signals and allowed Pierce’s people at Bell Labs to refine their techniques.

What followed Echo 1 was a space race within a space race, this one determining whether government or industry would send up the first active non-military communications satellite. In 1961, NASA awarded a contract for such a satellite to the company RCA, but Pierce and Bell Labs were undeterred. According to Calvin Tomkins, Bell Labs spent US$50-million (at early-1960s rates) for research and development and devoted about 700 of its personnel to the project.

The baby that was born of it all was a sphere weighing 170 pounds (77 kilograms), called Telstar 1. Going by specifications collected by Bill Yenne, an authority on U.S. spacecraft, Telstar 1 received signals at 6,390 megacycles, re-transmitted them at 4,170, and boasted of 600 voice channels and one channel for television.

Perched atop a Thor-Delta booster — paid for by Bell Labs but launched by NASA — Telstar 1 ascended on July 10, 1962. It did not go far, parking itself in an elliptical orbit less than 2,000 miles (3,220 kilometers) away. Within hours, Bell Labs arranged what was previously impossible — transatlantic television. As described by T.A. Heppenheimer, the ensuing video exchange humorously followed national stereotypes. The United States sent France and the U.K. taped material heavy on patriotic themes, the French responded with footage of actor Yves Montand and other cultural figures, and the British muddled about for a few days before getting things straight.

Humour aside, the achievement left the world stunned. In just the month of the launching of Telstar 1, the New York Times ran almost 100 articles related to the satellite. Joe Meek’s Telstar composition stormed the pop charts later in the year, and that 1963 New Yorker profile of Pierce ran for 29 pages. Telstar 1 did not outlast some of this acclaim, as it ceased transmission in early 1963, but it had blazed a path. Today, anyone using satellite TV or radio is honouring that decades-old triumph of engineering.

As for Pierce, he went on to become something of an enigma, and remained so up until his death in 2002. By the 1970s, his science fiction featured cyborg sex and conspiracy theories. In the 1980s, he helped pioneer digital music — but it was also revealed (by writer James Bamford) that he was once linked to the National Security Agency (NSA). He was a strange guy; yet perhaps a strange guy was the only kind who could have given us what Pierce did: the future.

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